Moxon's Master

"Moxon's Master" is a short story by the late 19th-century American author Ambrose Bierce that speculates on the nature of life and intelligence. It describes a chess-playing automaton that murders its creator. First published in The San Francisco Examiner on April 16, 1899, it is one of the first descriptions of a robot in English-language literature written much before the word 'robot' came to be used..

Plot summary

The master, Moxon, who creates a chess-playing atomaton, boasts to the narrator that even though machines have no brains, they can achieve remarkable things and therefore should be treated just like men of flesh and blood. After a thorough discussion about what it is to be "thinking" and "intelligent", the narrator leaves. The narrator returns to Moxon's house later to learn more. He enters and finds Moxon playing chess with an automaton. Moxon wins the game, and no one knows if the machine killed him or the automaton in an apparent fit of rage. The narrator later questions whether what he saw was real.

See also

• List of fictional robots and androids

Real or hoax chess-playing automatons:

• The Turk
• Walker Chess-player

External links

• Full text of the short story
• Moxon's Master public domain audiobook at LibriVox